About Ath5k

Ath5k is a completely FOSS wireless driver for Atheros based wireless chipset versions AR5xxx in the Linux Kernel. It has evolved out of MadWiFi, OpenHAL, and the open-sourced HAL code of Atheros and Sam Leffler.

News

2010-12-03

AHB Bus support: Support for the AHB bus got merged. Now ath5k can be used on AR231X and AR5312 embedded devices (WiSoC). (commit)

2010-11-30

Preparations for Turbo Mode and half/quarter rate support: Big internal update of PHY code to clean up turbo modes and reset and add half/quarter rate support (50/10MHz channel widths). These new modes are not enabled yet, and it's unlikely that there will be a standard API for enabling them in the near future, however developers/researchers can use them for various projects like 802.11p support. (first commit)

Synthesizer-only channel change for newer chips: On AR2413/AR5413 we now support faster channel switching by skipping normal reset and directly setting the channel on PHY while it's still active (commit).

2010-10-05

Support for virtual STA and AP added: Support for up to 4 virtual APs and as many virtual STA interfaces as desired got added (commit). This feature is sometimes also called “Multi ESSID” and allows us to configure several AP and STA interfaces on top of only one physical device.

modprobe ath5k
sudo ip link set wlan%d up
sudo iwconfig wlan%d essid any
# Make sure you get auth'd and then assoc'd
# Then either set an IP manually or get it via DHCP
ping gw

Supported Devices

See the ath5k device list. This list is still very much incomplete - please add your device/card if it works! A longer but less reliable list can be found at http://madwifi-project.org/wiki/Compatibility. It's worth trying your card with ath5k even though it is not in the list above, if it has one of the following chips:

Please when submitting a bug report always include your card's silicon revision for MAC and PHY chips, just look at your kernel log for a line like this one… or

dmesg |grep "ath5.*chip"

:

ath5k phy0: Atheros AR2413 chip found (MAC: 0x78, PHY: 0x45)

…and put it in your report.

lspci

information is much less useful than this.

ath5k TODO List

Things ath5k developers are currently working on, and other things to do:

* Tx power support (setting tx power) (Nick/Felix -works but experiments show that the card transmits only on some standard power levels instead of a power range as expected -still debuging, any ideas are welcome)

* Power saving (Bob)

* AR5210 support (EEPROM etc) (Nick)

* EAR (EEPROM Added Registers) support

* Documentation update/cleanup (Nick - added kerneldoc on all hw related functions and files, need to do some more reading)